(3:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Some initial thoughts on Levinasian Judaism

In the ancient world, there were two types of polities: Jewish and non-Jewish. Although the Jews preserved in their scriptures the accounts of their years as a "normal" political body, by the first century it was broadly recognized that the Jews as a people were constitutively a people of the diaspora. Spread throughout the world, nearly always a minority and certainly never much of a military force to contend with (the accounts of the strange exception under the Maccabees already points forward to Roman conquest), the Jews had to maintain their distinctive identity through persuasion -- both of their own members and of those worldly powers that possessed the power to crush them. Jewish authors of the first century, among them Josephus, Philo, and Paul, point out the contrast between persuasion and coercion, and although all three were willing, in particular circumstances, to allow considerations of coercive power to enter into their strategic considerations (whether avoiding it or indirectly using it through gaining the favor of those who possessed it), all three were clear that the Jewish way of going about things was superior and that any foray into coercion was in the interest of leaving open the space for the Jewish ways to be practiced.

Early Christianity, with its pacifism and its occasional employment of the strategy of martyrdom, grew out of this idea of the Jewish polity. Many are now eager to point out the political dimensions of Paul's letters, which extends beyond mere social "implications" that we may or may not draw from his main theological thrust. Paul's project is political in what Zizek has taught us to call the proper sense (and in a sense that goes far beyond Zizek's own application of his concept): it is the establishment, throughout the Roman empire, of the present reality of God's rule and reign, that is, the complete reconfiguration of political structures as such. The churches that Paul established were political bodies in which persuasion, not coercion, was the rule -- and they were political bodies that were much more radically inclusive than the mainstream of what we would later come to call Judaism (which, we must remember, did accept Gentile converts and even had its own aggressive missionary movements).

The cross-and-resurrection directly establishes this new polity by showing the Roman superpower to be utterly impotent, to be a society built not on human life and freedom, but rather on death and slavery. à Gauche asks what the church is for, hinting that it might become a training ground for partisans:

The hollowed-out shells of Europe's grand churches should not be abandoned to their fate as clearance carpet shops and community theatre centers. The silence after the kyrie must be marked by something other than a collective sigh. This is not to resist the movement of secularization, but to remind kneeling supplicants that (as Fr. Marion says) a God capable of death was never God anyway.

Discipline taught by useless and unproductive repetition: is Eucharistic adoration and recitation of the novenas really so different from Daniel-san whitewashing the fence in The Karate Kid? Maybe, but the similarity points toward an answer to the question, "What then is the Church for?"

Already in this post we have had imagery of standing armies; clearly preparation for war is tantamount to war itself. At the same time, we have continual gestures toward some future revolution, with a new Lenin to lead it. Yet is the way to establish the new society of freedom (and, in terms of my argument above, this means persuasion rather than coercion) simply to "admit" the inevitability of coercion and attempt to "get it over with" all at once? Zizek sees that Lenin's program had to lead to a reestablishment of the state, and although Zizek does not often draw upon non-Marxist political analysis, we would do well to remember Weber's definition of the state as a monopoly on violence. What we want is not just a different state. What we want is the definitive end to violence.

Surely the oppressed are justified in their fantasies of conquering their conquerers; though that would fulfill a certain type of "justice," it leaves the same basic structure of violence in place. A world in which Africans had imported slaves from Europe, for example, would not be qualitatively better or more just than our present world. Yet these fantasies must be dealt with, must be given their place -- and in apocalypticism, of which Christianity is the best-known example, that place is in the future, in God's hands. God will conquer the conquerers; God will destroy those who threaten to destroy us; God will definitively end violence with his divine violence. To go along with this promise of divine vengeance, we have the promise of resurrection, the ultimate assurance of our vindication -- even if our practice of God's reign and rule leads to our death, it is still worth it. We still get our reward.

As Derrida suggests in The Gift of Death, this is a risky, perhaps even incoherent move, seeming to shift the same structure of economy and coercion into the divine sphere -- yet it is a move that clears the space for a present practice of God's kingdom. If we are assured that violence, despite its continuing presence, is a problem that has been definitively taken care of, then we are free to establish the Jewish polity. We can afford to employ persuasion rather than coercion. I wonder, though, if it is possible to sustain such a polity when the promises of divine retribution (and resurrection) are so utterly unconvincing to us.

I wonder also if Levinas, subject to so much abuse from Zizek and others for his advocacy of the crassest Zionism, is more closely related to Lenin (and Zizek) than we might think. Levinas's goals, of course, are admirable, built on a very attractive philosophy of otherness -- they are essentially the goals of the Jewish polity. Zionism represents a perilous temptation for Judaism, on the one hand offering the definitive assurance of a space for Jewish identity and polity, and on the other opening the door for the Jewish polity to become bastardized into yet another coercive state, just like any other. It's understandable that one might think, in the wake of the Holocaust, that the risk is thoroughly worth it -- that the opportunity for revolution must be created through force.

Zionism is the option of the book of Esther, wherein the place of Xerxes is occupied by a succession of U. S. Presidents -- and by an interesting coincidence, the Hebrew version of Esther contains no reference to Israel's God, nor many references to its distinctive traditions. The Jews are just one more oppressed group among many, trying to advance their cause in a world dominated by violence. Zizek advocates such naked power struggles -- but is such advocacy really in line with the "subversive core" of Christianity? Does Zizek's tearing of Christianity out of its Jewish context make nonsense out of it? Is his advocacy of a new Leninism really anything more than a masked form of advocating an attempt to "get ahead" in the present order, which we cannot definitively overturn?

(This blog post can obviously only gesture in certain directions. I think Zizek needs to stop reading Badiou and start reading some contemporary New Testament scholarship. In addition, the connection to the discussion of Benjamin should be obvious at this point.)

| permalink | Main Page